


My best friend, my lover

by skinnylittlered



Series: Days in the life. [2]
Category: Tom Hiddleston - Fandom
Genre: Actor Tom Hiddleston, Best Friends, Childhood Friends, Developing Relationship, Domestic Bliss, Domestic Fluff, Erotica, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Long-Distance Relationship, Long-Term Relationship(s), RPF, Romance, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-30 15:14:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21430285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skinnylittlered/pseuds/skinnylittlered
Summary: Andrea and Tom have been friends since the beginning of time. Until a confession of love is made. This story follows the events of their subsequent relationship.
Relationships: Tom Hiddleston/Original Female Character(s)
Series: Days in the life. [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1545007
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

  
As I pull my hair back in quite possibly the fiftieth bun, a bun by which I’m trying to convey that I_ did_ try, but at the same time that I didn’t try _too much_, but inevitably fail for the, quite possibly fiftieth time I groan in defeated exasperation raising my hands to the unforgiving high heavens and damn it all to hell, just letting my arms slump and my hair fall back in its usual, otherwise perfectly passable, waves, I decide that this is probably the end of me as a potential romantic social being because at this point it seems that my whole self esteem is, irrationally, loosely hanging by the very thin thread of my very poor skill of fashioning a complementary hairdo to my outfit, a skill that I, naturally, expected myself to acquire by precisely fifteen minutes of watching instructional videos of how to accomplish such a task, and ten minutes of attempting to recreate it myself. Surely, I should have known that an amateur thirty something year old with virtually no experience in hair styling other than the casual, day-to-day hairdo, could match that of a teenager who essentially does it for a job. Surely.

  
_Surely_.

  
Or... maybe if I do let my hair rest on my shoulders as it usually does, however now more orderly that in it generally is, thanks to the application of several products that I didn’t really know I needed, but now that I have been acquainted with, decide I maybe will actually use in the future I might actually have succeeded in doing the very thing that I believed I had been failing at all along. As I look in the mirror, perspective anew, I thank the lord for both sixteen year olds on the internet and self suggestion, both very powerful tools in the life of a woman.   
All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the result. Hair may have proven, along the three decades of my inhabiting this earth to be one thing that, try as I might, I could never really master, but makeup and dressing up are things that, if I may say so myself, I’m pretty damn good at. Trial and error, of course, has proven to be the mother of all teachers and, with god as my witness, there was quite the number of errors in my trials. However, as I’m shamelessly admiring my full length reflection I’m happy to conclude that this may be the culmination of my learning experience and what a perfect opportunity of that to happen, this date that I have been hoping for but never really letting myself to expect for most of my adult life. 

  
There is, indeed, a life out of the friend zone. Or at least for those of us who are lucky enough to have the object of our desires return our sentiments, there is. As it turns out, I am one of those happy ones and I would rather not consider the alternative. It is much to dreadful to ponder upon right now, and I believe I’ve done more than my fair share of thinking about it so far. Tonight is a celebration of my triumph. Tonight is about new beginnings and the beautiful things that can spawn out of a life long friendship turned romance. Tonight is our first date and I cannot wait to see him, and I am excited, and anxious, and jubilant, and absolutely terrified and- 

  
As the train of thought is all but a hair’s width away from crashing into the sometimes thicker than I’d like it to be bone of my skull, I try to distract myself by admiring my outfit once more, but, however nice it is, the second time around it doesn’t really work anymore. Trepidation is a very strong detractor from reality, and in reality, it’s just going to be me and him. Alone. On a date. There are so many ways this can become very fucked up in various ways but, thankfully enough, before I can make a mental inventory of each and all of them, possibly in alphabetical order, and drive myself various degrees of insane in a very short time span, the alarm I set for leaving home and picking him up at the airport goes off and I bolt out the door.

  
The car drive and subsequent wait at the airport go by in a flurry of faces and roads and the trees by those roads, and bad music on the radio, and there, emerging from this mix of mismatched elements is his face. I see him looking around the crowd, eyes searching, with his brows furrowed as they do when he’s focused on something, and I wait patiently for him to locate me. His expression changes visibly when he does, softening a bit and I’m frozen into place with anxiety. Serves me right to feel like this after having dumped all of my emotional baggage on him right before he had to leave. As he strides towards me, I have the sudden urge to make a run for home and just spend the day watching TV reruns and eating junk food instead of torturing myself like this. But here he is, and here I am, and here we are, silently sharing an awkward hug in Heathrow, silently walking towards my car outside of Heathrow, silently driving the very same car away from Heathrow...  
He clears his voice and hesitates before speaking.

  
“So... How’ve you been?”

  
My god, this really doesn’t feel right.

  
“Good. You?”

  
He is no longer turned to face me, but looking straight ahead at the road before us. His reply is absent minded, completely devoid of any inflection.

  
“Fair.”

  
“How’s your Da?”

  
This time a smile breaks through his poker face. Finally, something familiar. 

  
“Getting younger every day. A lad in his prime, I’d say.”

  
“I bet!”

  
“He asked about you, you know?”

  
“Yeah?”

  
It isn’t really like I wouldn’t or didn’t expect that. I’ve known the man for most of my life, I’ve been to his house in Edinburgh more times than I can count on two hands, I send him homemade pie on Christmas. Of course he would ask about me, but I humour the conversation because, well, because it’s the first time since we’ve seen each other when we’re a bit more relaxed, so I let myself slip into the customer talk of how his father is, his eternal joie de vivre, the weather in Scotland, and others, feeling the air in the car become a bit lighter as we converse. Before long, I’m parked in the lot beside his house and the trepidation is slowly settling back in, evident to both of us.

  
“I’ll, uh, just drop my bag really quickly and be right back in? Or would you like to come up?”

  
I shake my head. He nods and exits the car.  
There’s no way I can go back there, not with how I’m feeling, how we’re both feeling, right now, not with what happened the last time I was there, crying and professing my love, the love that had been corroding at my peace for years, unbeknownst to him, essentially dropping its decade weight on him out of nowhere. Fortunately, my love was mirrored by his, I found out the very same day, but that doesn’t really change much about the current situation. Our paradigm was shaken to the core, our mannerisms, before then fuelled by platonic pretense, however romantic our intentions might have subconsciously been, became deconstructed, crumbled before us. We have to re-learn friendship, to integrate love into the equation, to function as a couple. Moreover, there is the aspect of physicality to be considered. That fateful day brought with itself not only theoretical revelations, as it did carnal ones. For the first time in thirty something years, we knew each other as man and woman, fully wholly, biblically. It was a hunger that I did not even know I needed satiated to that extent, which is why I’d maybe disregarded it almost completely up to that point - also an instance of how such a powerful tool as self suggestion might come into play in one’s life, I reckon – but now that had a bite of the proverbial apple, I wanted more. Alas, what mess we’ve got ourselves into!

  
I startle as the car door opens and raise my forehead from the wheel. He is looking at me, not saying anything, and, breathing in, I do the same, feeling like I’m finally seeing him for the first time since I picked him up. This is Tom, my best friend since childhood. Tom, my partner through good and bad, high and low, the boy who thought me how to do a slingshot, who held my hair the first time I was hungover, who I, not only once, sent out on tampon runs at the most inconvenient times of the day. Tom, who smells like my childhood and maturity all in one. Tom, my best friend, my lover, my confidante, my Tom. 

  
_My Tom_.

  
“I missed you.”  
He smiles, a genuine, blossoming smile that reaches his eyes and it’s all back to normal for a brief second. Then his face comes closer to mine, so close that we’re breathing each other’s air and my heart flutters again. But this time it’s excitement. It’s new and it’s scary and I want to run away and jump in his arms at the same time and- 

  
“I missed you, too,” he whispers against my lips and then kisses me. He kisses me for I don’t really know how long, and nor do I care, and it’s different familiarity than what I knew, but I know him and for the time being that’s all that matters. 


	2. Chapter 2

I don’t see how I could ever tire of this.

Surely, this feeling might be greatly influenced by the fact that, due to his absolutely hellish schedule his job all but demands, and the very static nature of my own job – I am, more often than not, essentially tied to my desk and the seemingly never ending piles of papers that consume most of my time at work and sometimes my free time as well, so more time than I’d ever care to admit to myself or any who may inquire – we have probably spent somewhere in the vicinity of maybe a fortnight in each other’s presence in the last three months and, while I would have been completely content with the situation should things have transpired in that way, there’s more to a relationship, I’m being told, than fucking each other’s brains for the whole of the time we’re together. Thusly, precious time which could have been dedicated to mindless penetration was regrettably wasted on romantic niceties and such other nonsense which I could have really done without, regardless of how _cute_ they may be. 

This is precisely why, as I find myself kneeling against the headrest of his bed – well, technically, _our _bed now – and being pounded into with the fervour that I thought was only reserved for pubescent boys furiously masturbating against any surface even remotely resembling the softness that is specific to the female kind, I am relishing maybe more so than I generally would during copulation. Not to cause any misunderstanding, Tom has proved himself to be quite the competent lover, effectively obliterating the sparse doubts I may have amassed in regards to that topic. Doubts, I should add, that were compiled during the not infrequent locker talk that I either overheard or was a present participant to over the years of our friendship. Honestly, men have such a way of perorating about their sexual conquests that it renders a female of the even coarser sensibilities (or maybe _especially _her) to regard their grandiose claims as at least dubious if not entirely unbelievable. But, fortunately for all the parties involved, that is both myself and him, those claims are, irrefutably if not quite as monumentally, backed up by facts - he is a man of a certain degree of mastery, not to be overlooked, when it comes to gratifying the beautiful sex.

And here I am, being thoroughly gratified – _thoroughly _being the operative word – as I am taken from behind, with great enthusiasm. He’s got me by a fistful of hair and a fistful of hip, grunting as he thrusts into me, and it is music to my ears, accompanied by the sounds of his pelvis slamming into my ass – a symphony of absolute debauchery if I’ve ever heard one. I, naturally, being the refined erotic artist that I fancy myself to be, am holding my own to this most exquisite harmony of sounds, positive that my moans and screams of pleasure can be heard from across the street, but I indulge in expressing my satisfaction shamelessly, completely neglecting any sense of the basest form of propriety or moral value instilled in me since infanthood. I revel in the delights of the flesh to the uttermost extent, I am unabashed and completely incorrigible and I am -

_Oh, god, I’m -_

I cry out my climax, bending backwards toward him in a way that I am certain might be highly uncomfortable if not impossible were it not for the adrenaline shooting through me. He reaches to my ear and whispers rough words that would otherwise be insulting, that he would not be caught dead addressing a woman in a different scenario, but right now only intensify my pleasure, coaxing it out of me. I whimper and I come, as I am commanded, and it doesn’t register in my brain that I am no longer at my apex even minutes later, when he stiffens to his own release.

Panting and sweating, we both let ourselves fall on the crumpled sheets of our lovemaking. Tom is, soon enough, fast asleep, but I am, although physically spent, nowhere near enough to drowsy. I am somehow full of energy but unable to manifest it, and, to save myself from the eventual frustration that will overcome me in this paradoxal state and because of it, I raise from the bed and head for the shower, pondering almost disinterestedly at the domestic tasks that I have to accomplish for the day and other such things.

It’s been three months. Three very convoluted, intense, consuming months. So much so, that, except for the occasional talks we have confronting the subject during our very infrequent times together, we did not really have the time others may have to slide into conjugality, it’s still quite foreign territory, although broadly discussed. Between travelling to every and all corners of the world, filming and catering to his fanbase and, winning awards, we tried to fit in our newly developed liaison. We went on dates and held hands and our interactions slowly metamorphosised, without losing the friendly quality of the ones prior to our respective confessions, into something entirely new, but still very familiar. Our romance, we learned, is in the small things. Not much of our demeanour towards the other has changed, but the subtleties which make all the difference in the world are ever present, and those lay in our knowledge. He doesn’t look at me any differently, nor does he speak to me differently, nor does he hug me longer nor tighter, but his love, professed and recognised, gives other meaning to what was before. There are, of course, the intimacies that are entirely strange to the realm of platonic, but those are hardly ever on display – I am the part of him that the world shall merely know of, but never _know _– and to the couple of us, they seem but a natural extension to something that was present all along. But that does not domesticity make. This we shall learn as we go, one morning waking up together at a time. 

_Or one homemade meal at a time?_ I speak the question rhetorically, as there is no one in the room to answer, and giggle at myself a bit as I’m chopping various vegetables for supper. 

Cooking was not an activity that I have ever particularly enjoyed or was any good at. Obviously, nobody is particularly proficient at anything from the onset, lest for an inherent propensity that might as well be divinely gifted, as the general consensus seems to be with the average folk, but I appeared to be, from early times, especially unskilled at any culinary endeavours. My attitude towards the matter was the insurmountable obstacle toward my progression in the field – I would never, for the life of me, be caught in the kitchen, either by myself or others, when the convenience of the ready-to-eat, brought-to-your-own-door meal was an available commodity, even in college, when money was less than it is now. With an upper middle class family to support me and a part time job as a barista, money was hardly the issue – it would be highly hypocritical of me to not acknowledge the very fact that beauty pays for itself; I am an example of the basic caucasian standard of classic beauty: honey blonde hair, blue eyes and a slim oval face, the body that I religiously keep fit to serve my vanity more than my health or any other purpose, and a sweet disposition that I nearly cunningly employ to my advantage, I would never dare say that life wasn’t made easier by those cumulus of facts. 

But cooking, or any other traditionally womanly activities, I discovered as I was growing up, became more tolerant, even pleasant when their result has a recipient. I may not enjoy preparing my own food, I am still as guilty of succumbing to pre-prepared commodities as I was in my youth when mine is the only mouth that needs feeding, but I certainly do enjoy putting a meal together for my partners, and Tom is no exception. If anything, he’s the instance reinforcing the rule. In the little time we’ve had together, I’ve made it my mission to bring him a home he can take refuge in anywhere we may be.

“What’s cookin’, good lookin’?”

Ah, speak of the devil, there he is, all six feet and two inches of freshly roused glory, donning just boxers and a tee, and a self-satisfied smirk on his face, for somewhat reason.

“I did not buy it then; I don’t buy it now.”

“First of all, you said you did-”

“I lied.”

“And _second_, mean.”

“Am I?”

“You hurt my achey breakey heart.”

“I think your heart is just fine, thank you very much.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he chuckles against my neck as he hugs me from behind, sending a shiver down my spine. “My heart is mighty fine, although I do wonder about my stomach. It is very sanitary to be cooking in your underwear?”

“I am wearing a t-shirt!”

“…and no pants.”

“Well, I was going for sexy, not sanitary.”

“You’re always sexy.”

I huff.

“There’s no point to flattery, Hiddleston, with me, you can already get anything you want.”

“I’m not flattering. I do think you’re sexy. Always have.”

“Always?”

“Yeah. I never really wanted to admit it to myself, because that would have been… problematic, but I did. You’re a very beautiful woman.”

Although I am very much aware of that, his declaration still puts a knot in my throat and, like the sap that I am, my eyes become moist with overdramatic tears. I turn and rest my forehead on his chest, holding his body closer to mine. “I know.”

He laughs at my muffled reply, but is quick to chastise my illogical crying.

“Oh, dear, none of that. I can make a list of all of the things that are absolutely awful about you, then you can hate me and stop the waterworks.”

Sentiment promptly forgotten, I take a step back and glare at him.

“There’s nothing awful about me, I’m perfect!”

“Like hell you are,” his laugh is mirthful and unforgiving. 

“Fine. Tell me three things which are awful about me.”

His reply is matter-of-fact and not at all hesitant.

“You’re self-centred, vain, and not only slightly superficial. And, while we’re at it, your cooking’s not fantastic, either. I think you take after your mother.”

“That last one was mean and uncalled-for! But, fuck, I sound terrible. Am I so terrible?” 

The fact that I pulled out the puppy eyes on him on that last bit surely only emphasises some of my shortages in good character, because I’m doing it just to torment him. I know he doesn’t and I know he’ll feel especially bad for being so blunt in his criticism, and he’ll pull his very own variation of the puppy-eyes on me to be granted forgiveness later, which I will of course provide after making him repent. 

_Orally_.

“Why are you smirking all of a sudden?”

“Huh?”

“What’s with the face?”

“Ah, nothing. Up for takeout pizza?”

“Fuck, yeah.”

Yeah, we’re going to be just fine, Tom Hiddleston and I. Maybe not one homemade meal at a time, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s notes: It’s been about four years since I last wrote pretty much anything in any way literary (maybe some poetry here and there), and I decided that I miss it (and was pestered by some folks very dear to me to get my ass in gear and just do it again) so, yeah. Decided that, since I was so comfortable with the medium of fanfic, this would be a good place to give my writing bones a good crackin’, and so far things have been surprisingly nice. I honestly thought the fandom was dead, but it seems that you guys are still alive and very much kicking. 
> 
> Aaaaanywaaayyy.
> 
> I wanted to send out a huge, huge thanks to those of you who stuck for so long. It makes a girl shed a tiny but highly valuable tear. Also huge thanks for those of you who have stumbled upon my work while I was gone, those who sent messages and likes and kudos and reblogs and all that fun stuff. I came back to quite a number of those and, well, let’s just add another tiny tear to that previous one. Also thanks to those of you who are new to the my tiny blog of stories, another tiny tear and I will be full on tiny crying.
> 
> Thank you! 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back, I guess?


End file.
